A California judge ruled Monday the state couldn’t force a cake shop owner to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding, ruling that doing so would constitute a violation of free speech.
Superior Court Judge David Lampe denied the State of California’s request for a preliminary injunction that sought to force bakeshop owner Cathy Miller to design a wedding cake for a gay couple.
“For this court to force such compliance would do violence to the essentials of Free Speech guaranteed under the First Amendment,” Lampe ruled, according to a press release sent to The Daily Caller News Foundation. The injunction also posited that if Miller refused to design the cake, the state would force her to close her Tastries Bakery shop altogether.
...The cake baking incident comes after the Supreme Court announced in June that it would hear a similar case that occurred in 2012, when a baker in Denver refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. Lower courts had previously ruled that Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop had violated the state’s accommodation laws by refusing to serve a customer based on sexual orientation, according to The Washington Post.
